Struggles Explode Throughout Chinaby David
Whitehouse
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 22, 2004First Published in
Socialist Worker

Growing
inequality and social displacement in China have fueled a string of
protests, riots and strikes since August.

Unlike the 1989 protests
centered around Tiananmen Square, which brought out mostly state-employed
industrial workers in support of students in the major cities, the current
unrest comes from all sectors of the workforce. Peasants in the interior,
veteran employees of state enterprises and young workers in the booming
coastal “export zones” have all been involved in major confrontations that
display a high degree of class solidarity.

The explosions of struggle
reflect long-simmering anger at the arrogance of China’s rulers --including
the Communist Party bureaucrats who routinely cash in their political clout
for personal gain.

In October, according to an
account posted to the Web, a tax official in central China’s Sichuan
province beat a migrant worker on the street with a pole and broke his leg.
When police arrived, they backed up the official.

Within hours, tens of
thousands of infuriated workers rallied at government offices in Wangzhou
City to demand justice. They broke windows and set police cars on fire.
Thousands of police and paramilitary forces used tear gas and rubber bullets
in street battles with crowds of workers that ran into the night.

In another central
province, Shaanxi, 6,800 workers at a newly privatized textile factory beat
back an assault on their livelihoods in a bitter seven-week strike that
ended in late October. The new owners sought layoffs, lower wages and
elimination of workers’ seniority, benefits and pensions--measures that are
typical of the “restructuring” that goes along with the sell-off of
state-owned factories.

In response, the workers,
mostly women, occupied the factory in September. Authorities sent 1,000 cops
to expel the workers, but thousands of supporters held back the
police--singing revolutionary songs including the “Internationale.”

In Sichuan, 100,000 farmers
protested being evicted from prime farmland because of the construction of a
hydroelectric dam. Reports of police repression included 17 deaths, 40
injuries and more than 100 arrests.

Meanwhile, young sweatshop
workers in the booming southern coastal province of Guangdong -- who produce
export items such as shoes and electronics for wages of $2 a day -- have
mounted an unprecedented wave of strikes since the summer.

In the midst of the current
unrest, Chinese officials decided December 8 to cancel an international
conference on workers’ rights slated for the following week in Beijing.

Since the repression of the
1989 Tiananmen rebellion, in which hundreds of worker militants were killed
and thousands arrested, struggles in China have grown in a familiar pattern.
The harsh conditions of China’s boom produce widespread anger and contempt
for authority, but state repression of the most basic rights keeps the anger
bottled up until it explodes.

Workers typically endure
12-hour workdays and six-day weeks, the continual threat of mass layoffs and
some the most dangerous working conditions in the world. For example, China
produces one-fifth of the world’s coal--but four-fifths of the world’s
deaths from mining accidents.

Outside the highest-growth
centers along the coast, there is mass unemployment in rural areas and
industrial “rust-belt” towns. Official joblessness runs at 4 percent, but
Robin Munro of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin puts the real
figure as high as 23 percent. Layoffs from state-owned enterprises total 25
million since 1998, says Munro, and only two-thirds of those workers have
found new jobs.

President Hu Jintao has
announced a final round of privatizations to reduce the number of
state-owned enterprises from 190,000 to 190 in the next few years -- which
promises new windfalls for investors and Communist Party bosses at the
expense of current employees.

In the countryside, where
800 million of China’s 1.3 billion people live, conditions are even more
harsh. Peasant families lease land leased from the state, but the plots are
less than five acres, so peasants consume 65 percent of what they produce.
Meanwhile, the state has withdrawn peasants’ medical benefits and increased
taxes for education. In the past decade, as many as 70 million have lost
their land to construction of housing, roads, factories and dams, according
to the New York Times, and figure is likely to reach 100 million.

This year, the government
relaxed apartheid-like restrictions on internal migration, so hundreds of
thousands of peasants are fleeing to the cities in search of jobs. According
the Far Eastern Economic Review, urbanized peasants are sub-leasing their
land to agro-conglomerates, which are stitching together plots to form
large-scale cash farms employing landless migrants at less than $2 a day.

The newest parts of the
economy continue to boom -- centered mostly in the coastal provinces of
Guangdong and Fujian -- and account for a large share of China’s 9 percent
overall growth rate. In fact, there is a labor shortage in some of these
areas, which helps explain the boldness of Guangdong’s workers in the past
six months.

Workers’ strong bargaining
position comes at a time when bosses are trying to squeeze them because of
price hikes in oil and raw materials. Food costs are inflated, too, with a
30 percent rise in the price of staple grains as farmland gets paved over or
converted to profitable orchards and vegetable farms.

The working population has
every reason to struggle -- and has the fighting spirit and class solidarity
to do this. The task is to build organization and broader links that can
sustain, coordinate and escalate these struggles.

David Whitehouse is a correspondent for Socialist Worker. This article first appeared on the SW website
(http://socialistworker.org/). Thanks to Alan Maass.